Something interesting often happens when we leave a relationship or leave a job or otherwise make a choice in our lives to go in a particular direction. Choosing is never easy (when it’s easy we just call it “doing” rather than choosing), and when it’s about something big, and especially when it involves another person, it takes a lot of our emotional resources to wrestle with it.
Very often there are parts of us that are longing for a particular choice to be made, but we can’t quite wrap our all-too-rational minds fully around that choice. Maybe it feels scary or overwhelming or downright impossible, or maybe we worry that it represents parts of us that are hard to acknowledge – like a desire for things we think we shouldn’t want. Maybe we worry that we’ll be judged as silly or selfish. Maybe we worry it means something about us we’re not yet ready to acknowledge.
And because to make that choice, especially when it’s to leave or change something, feels hard to swallow, we do something that creates its own kind of swirl: we cast a villain.
It often happens not just in the rearview mirror, but rather starts in the time leading up to actually making the choice. Our minds can really struggle with cognitive dissonance – the experience of holding conflicting feelings and desires – and so they try to release us from the burden of our multiplicity of feeling by making things just a little more black and white.
We start to notice all of the unsavory things that this person does. We start to clock every time our job fails to deliver on what we thought it would. We find a label or a diagnosis and assign it to this person because it lets us categorize them in a way that we believe means they can’t change. We start to register every way in which we feel wronged or failed by the system or the other side.
This happens in politics and culture. This happens in office break rooms. This happens in bedrooms. The tendency toward constructing villains is everywhere; you see it the second you start to look.
It often starts small, sometimes with just a seed of doubt, but a villain narrative grows quickly because our minds love to water them. Cognitive scientists might call it confirmation bias, which is the tendency to find evidence for what our minds are already telling us. We can throw in hindsight bias too, which is the tendency to make whatever choice we already made feel better to us by unconsciously distorting the historical facts. Cognitive biases are frustrating because, even when we know they exist, we struggle so hard to see them in ourselves.
Here’s the thing about casting a villain: it can feel really good. It lets us feel vindicated for our decisions. It lets us feel like the narrative is clean and tidy. It lets us stop perseverating on the issue because the story just flows more nicely.
But, as you probably guessed I might say, it’s actually so damaging. Not just to the other person or institution or group of humans who’ve now been cast as a villain, but to us too. Because if there is a villain, there must be a victim. And when we cast ourselves as a victim, we are limiting our own humanity.
I want to take a beat here to clarify that I don’t mean to say that we are never victimized. All of us have experienced victimization at some or many points. In situations of exploitation or significant deceit or when we’ve been dehumanized, ‘victim’ may be the most accurate way to describe our role in the experience. I’m talking not about those situations here, but the more subtle ones – the ones where the power differential isn’t stark and the harm not egregious. I’m talking about when we are in the messy gray of complicated human relationships and tricky decisions.
It can honestly be hard to parse, which is what makes it so easy to find ourselves in the habit of constructing villains. And for those of us who have experienced early childhood trauma and invalidation, there can be an even stronger pull toward this. Early trauma wires our brain with an even more intense desire for the binaries of right and wrong, good and evil – so we end up wanting – and sometimes making – the world to fit into them.
Circling back to how this hurts us – when we need a villain to feel solid or validated in feeling our feelings or making our decisions, we narrow the field of what we feel justified in doing. If our psyche feels like our manager has to be totally insensitive in order to feel it’s acceptable to not like them or to leave our job, we tell ourselves that we can only do what feels right when we have been more deeply wronged – rather than just because something doesn’t feel good. If our psyche feels like our sister has to be toxic in order to not want to spend the holidays at her house, we tell ourselves it’s not okay to want to do something different than the family expectation.
Again, maybe our manager sucks. Maybe our sister is toxic. But maybe – and this is a real maybe because I don’t know your story – maybe it’s more complicated.
When we resist the urge to cast a villain, we choose to sit in that complexity. It’s far from easy, because our minds love certainty. But when we’re willing to forgo the certainty or the labels or the tidy narrative, we have the chance to look at a fuller story. It’s like the difference between fairy tales and literary fiction. When we forgo the villain, we get to exist in the latter, like those movies where we’re left not knowing how to feel or who to hate and who to love but we know we just took in something profoundly real and moving.
Importantly, living with villains means that we aren’t one either! So often we feel the pull to cast a villain because we’ve grown up with the template that there must be one. So if it’s not them – it’s us.
Living without villains is a practice in befriending the untidiness of reality. It’s a spiritual practice for some. At its core is a commitment to letting ourselves acknowledge the less comfortable feelings or desires that may have driven some of our own decisions or experiences. We may not always be ready for that, and that’s okay too. But it can still be important to at least consciously acknowledge that this is where we are.
If you find yourself regularly casting villains, especially when making hard decisions, I invite you to self-compassionately reflect on these questions:
- How could I tell this story if I wrote it with no villains at all?
- Where has confirmation bias potentially been shaping the things I notice or remember in this situation?
- What feelings, desires, or needs might I be faced with owning if there wasn’t a villain in my story?
- What qualities or aspects of the villain in my story might be things that I actually wished for more of in myself? (even if I wouldn’t do it the exact same way)
- What does it feel like in my body when I release the idea of a binary?
By the way, none of this means that we have to stay in the situation or accept whatever was being dealt by the person or institution. It simply means that we can choose to release ourselves without actually having to have a tidy narrative. We reclaim complexity and the fullness of our humanity along with it.
